Welcome back. Last weekend's Senate election in Western Australia had one very local and
very Australian issue running through it. Sharks. According to the Greens, one of the
planks of their success was their strong campaign against shark culling. The state government's
decision to trap and kill the predators in recent months has brought thousands out in
their protestors out in their thousands. But on the other side of the Indian Ocean, it's
a very different story. Their protestors are calling for the sharks to be killed. David
O'Shea has the story.
I've been invited to Sunday dinner with a family on Reunion Island. Today we're eating
shark. My host tonight, Edson, has dressed for the occasion. He's dishing up two types
of shark, Mako and Oceanic Whitetail. Shark has always been on the menu in this French
territory. But now, some worry, it's humans on the menu.
Reunion Island is now one of the top four locations in the world for shark fatalities.
The victims range from surfers and bodyboarders to a 15-year-old girl swimming five metres
from shore. Public outcry led to an order from the French government, granting the systematic
capture and killing of 90 sharks in Reunion.
Five dead people. Tara, the last dead victim. Sébastien, another one. Eddie Aubert. It's
crazy.
I'm a population about these kind of dangerous animals. It's not disunuous. It's not teddy
bear. Would you swim here? Would you swim? No way.
How can you tell tourists to come from Australia or to come from Paris, to come over here for
a month holiday and not to bathe?
So what are you doing? You just kill them all.
In Western Australia, a shark cull was introduced in response to the deaths of seven people
over three years. The first kill in January prompted anti-cull protests around the country.
You know what? That's their ocean. We respect them. We love them. We don't want them killed.
And hopefully, Colin Barnett got the message today.
On Reunion Island over the same three-year period, there were 13 shark attacks, five
of them fatal. But the reaction here is completely different to Australia. They're demanding
people need to be protected, not the sharks. This message says, stop the attacks. And this
give us back the ocean.
Though different resident species are found in these waters, it's the bull sharks bearing
the brunt of public anger, because they're responsible for most of the recent attacks.
This is the kind of small place where everyone knows someone affected.
Reunion Island is home to Australian Mick Asbury. As someone who's lived here for nearly
40 years, he can see why the response is so different. This is a tiny island with few
people in the water, compared to an enormous Australia where tens of thousands enjoy the
sea daily. So proportionally, the attacks here are off the scale.
There's not that many people out there in a very small area, and they're getting taken.
And if anything like that happened anywhere in the world, they'd be killing all the damn
sharks. So people like to theorise and people like to have an opinion and a moral opinion,
but I think it's relevant to be actually in the situation and the knowledge of the area
and what's actually happening in the territory where these things are taking place. I mean,
Western Australia is a whole different ballgame.
Mick owns a surf shop, like many businesses, it's suffering because of a drop in tourist
numbers to the island as a result of the shark attacks. He's been surfing 55 years, and although
he's never seen a shark here, he knows the threat is real.
We kind of think it's a couple of mean sharks that are doing all this. Definitely so aggressive,
so brutal. As far as I'm concerned, I don't really want to go around killing any animals,
but there's a certain time that it has to be done, you know, and called a cull or whatever
you want. I mean, it's kangaroos or whatever. Who's that? All right, mate. Bon surf.
Mick supports the local authorities in their decision to cull, but he's not so supportive
of their other measure, banning swimming and surfing around most of the island. If they
catch you, it's a 39 euro fine. That's almost 60 Australian dollars for taking a dip in
the sea. Hey, really, look out.
In an attempt to get the message through to die-hard surfers like Mick and his friend
Rodolf here, the governor sent a patrol boat to the main surf spot. It didn't really work.
So he sends the army in, right, which costs a damn fortune for the boat and the whole
like, the whole big operation and all they catch is one road off. That's a classic.
And what did they do to him?
They let him go because I mean, it was just so ridiculous.
Bon, je vais pas me rendre comme ça, je vais faire la police. Donc je suis parti me réfugier
en ville et puis j'étais poursuivi pendant 20 minutes. 20 minutes j'étais poursuivi
en suivant, bon.
It's a funny story, man.
Christophe Perry is one of the commercial fishermen employed to catch sharks. It's being run
as part of an existing shark tagging program.
The team are going to show me how they bait the lions. It's a six-month project using
new technology, smart drum lines, which send electronic signals.
When the alarm is triggered, they get an alert and have two hours to get to the drum line
so they can release any unwanted by-catch before it dies. That by-catch could be small
sharks, turtles or rays.
The tagging program is designed to monitor tiger and bull shark movement. And this extraordinary
file footage has been provided by those running the operation. They hope both the tagging
and catching of sharks will provide data to make beaches in Runeon safer.
Here is the kind of tag we use with the sharks. Fisheries scientist David Guyumard is Christophe's
boss. He's the project manager running both the tagging and shark reduction program. They
avoid using the term cull.
If we use them close to surfing area, the thing is that with that kind of receivers,
we know exactly from where they come to visit the area. That's the aim to protect this particular
area.
For many here, the rising tally of dead sharks offers a welcome psychological boost, even
if no one really knows if culls actually work here or in Australia.
Not one of Alain's six children shares his passion for surfing.
It's not surprising considering he lost his arm to a tiger shark in 1991. Neither the attack
nor the swimming ban has stopped him.
Since Alain lost his arm, there have been 22 shark incidents. That's about one attack
a year. All that changed in 2011. Seven attacks, two fatal. Matthew Shiller was one of them
and his violent death spread fear around the island. And Matthew was Loris' best friend.
He was fatally attacked by two sharks in front of tourists and locals on the main tourist
beach.
I brought back a bodyboard to his mother. We didn't even find a piece of flipper or
a piece of body. We didn't find anything. The two sharks just got rid of that body.
Now a shark net here provides one of the few patrolled spots where you can still swim. Matthew's
death made people feel the sharks were getting more aggressive. The loss of the champion bodyboarder
and well-liked surf instructor has been devastating. This video shows Matthew teaching Loris'
daughter to surf. And it's at this exact spot that he was taken.
You think your daughter will ever get over the fear of the sea now?
When she talks about the sea, the word after is shark. So I don't think she'll ever forget
that. I don't think she'll ever forget that there's a high risk of dying, a high risk
of getting chopped into her little friends that are in class. When you ask them to draw
something, there will always be a shark on the picture.
Matthew's friend Vincent was the lifesaver on duty who tried to rescue him.
It's after Matthew's death that we realized there was something that wasn't normal at all.
I lost a lot of friends in a year and a half. Today, the sea, I lost the sea too.
Many feel their very way of life is under threat from the shark crisis. The question
is, what's causing the spike in shark attacks? No one knows for sure, but everyone on the
island has a theory.
Take a seat. I'll come back.
Hello. Welcome on board.
Thank you.
Hervé Flamont is president of an association called Protect Our Children. He's taking me
into the marine reserve on the western side of the island. To explain why he thinks the
nature park is to blame for the shark crisis.
We're here for the marine reserve. We're ecologists, we love everything that's the sea. We wanted
the marine reserve, we signed it. Yes, we're here for the marine reserve, but we didn't
expect the nature to be affected by the marine reserve.
The marine reserve is a 40-kilometre-long protected zone set up in 2007 to help rehabilitate
the coral reef. Hervé is worried the increasing numbers of fish is attracting these unwelcome
visitors.
For us, it's what we call a food storage for sharks, not for big sharks, but for baby
sharks. For baby sharks, there are a lot of small fish that are extremely, that are
extremely sought after by the juveniles. For us, the problem is that mothers don't defend
their babies, they defend their territory.
And wanting to make the marine reserve, as some say, the so-called food storage for
sharks, it's completely, it's completely wrong.
Oceanologist Roland Tradek helped set up the marine reserve. He's critical of the local
hysteria.
What happened at the meeting, on this issue, is that personal certainty, feelings, didn't
apply to the analysis.
He said many scientists believe it's possible bull sharks are here because the reef ecosystem
has collapsed, not because it's recovering. They're hoping a healthy reef will see the
return to natural competition from reef sharks, which seem to have disappeared.
Christoph the fisherman and I are rushing to the port in the middle of the night. It appears
something large has taken the bait they put out earlier in the evening.
Well, it's two o'clock in the morning and the alarm has sounded, so we're going out
to check what's on the drum line.
Since the program started in January, Christoph and his team have caught only tiger sharks,
along with several other smaller species which were released. So far, no bull sharks.
Christoph has something hooked, but can't quite make out what it is.
It's a bull shark, man. Bull shark? Yeah, I see it. Look at that. It's quite big, yeah?
It's a nice bull shark, man. It's about three meters.
Some people are going to be very happy with you. Your first bull shark. Yeah, it's the
first bull shark in the drum line, and we would to prove that this system is effective
to catch bull sharks near the coast.
